There is in fact an eclipse today —

Microsoft joins the Eclipse foundation, open sources some of its plugins

The open source love affair continues.

The Eclipse Foundation, the organization that oversees development of the Eclipse development environment, has a new member: Microsoft announced Tuesday that it is joining so that it can more easily collaborate with the Eclipse community.

Simultaneous with that move, the company open sourced its Team Explorer Everywhere plugin for Eclipse, which allows Eclipse users to use Team Foundation Server for their version control and bug tracking. The code is now up on GitHub. The Team Explorer Everywhere plugin joins the Azure Toolkit for Eclipse, which is already open source.

To further streamline integration with Microsoft's services for Eclipse users, there is new support for Codenvy in Visual Studio Team Services. With the Codenvy extension, VSTS can generate an Eclipse workspace on demand, quickly setting up a virtual machine with all the right plugins and build tools to work on a project. Codenvy VMs can also now be provisioned on Azure thanks to a new Codenvy VM in the Azure Marketplace.

Visual Studio users need not worry; Microsoft is not planning to dump Visual Studio and replace it with Eclipse or anything like that. Rather, this is about ensuring that there are as few barriers as possible between developers and things like VSTS and Azure. As with so many of the company's recent cross-platform and open source efforts, the goal is to ensure that Microsoft tech is readily available and accessible even if you're not using .NET, Windows, or Visual Studio. After all, even if you're not using any of those things, there's still money to be made from Azure. Microsoft wants to bring its technology to wherever the developers are. Since Java developers often use Eclipse, that means building better support for Azure and VSTS for Eclipse.